


Alas, Babylon

by in_lighter_ink



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: 1-500 words, Comment Fic, Gen, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:09:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/in_lighter_ink/pseuds/in_lighter_ink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Doctor Who, the Ninth Doctor, Alas Babylon</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alas, Babylon

_Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come._

He staggered.

The silence was a physical, psychical blow, a stabbing searing ache.

Where there had been voices, presences, connections however tenuous, there was only a gaping wound, a hurt that would never heal, would never even bleed. (Bleeding requires that there be blood, and here was only emptiness. Nothingness. Void and abyss.)

He was alone.

Irrevocably, entirely, hearts-breakingly alone.

The TARDIS's console room was suddenly unfamiliar -- it had broken them both, this murderous, treasonous, _merciful_ act he had committed -- Victorian drawing room transmuted into coralish spires. Raw. Unfurnished. Alive.

He was unfamiliar, too, in a way that went too far beyond the new body (long hair cropped short as if in penance, frock coat ill-fitting and torn: nothing romantically heroic about him anymore). Unrecognizable, and no longer possessed of any context with which to create some definition of himself.

It had been necessary.

(Necessary: a cold word, condemning, hard and crystalline and immutable for all its hissing sibilants.)

It had been necessary, what he'd done. Burned. Destroyed. Cauterized. All in the name of healing.

He stumbled to the door, flung it open against the ice of space: he needed to see, and didn't want to read the doom he'd created in the spirals and cogs of a language he'd killed.

The Medusa Cascade stared back at him, empty. Locked.

It was all consigned to the past now, the undiscovered country that would never now be found. The Nightmare Child only a nightmare never born, the Could've Been King a never-will-be, Horde of Travesties disbanded, Cruciform shattered. Gallifrey's red skies forever burning, Skaro's metallic structures melted. Ash and component parts and never-again.

Accused, tried, and punished for war crimes, all of them.

All dead.

Because of him.

In the eternity between before and after, the Doctor fell to his knees and wept.

**Author's Note:**

> (Beginning quotation is Revelation 18:10)


End file.
